Geoffroy: Persistence, expertise pays off with ISU research grants

As the Ames business community continues to grow and potentially thrive in the coming years, one interested spectator will be Greg Geoffroy, the outgoing president of Iowa State University.

As the Ames business community continues to grow and potentially thrive in the coming years, one interested spectator will be Greg Geoffroy, the outgoing president of Iowa State University.

In a decade at the helm of one of the nation’s pre-eminent research universities, Geoffroy was part of an effort to blend ISU’s know-how and resources with private investment, bringing capital investment, grant funding and new jobs to Mid-Iowa, both on and off the ISU campus.

At a reception at the ISU Research Park on Nov. 28, Geoffroy complimented the business community, the city and the university for their cooperation to further economic development.

Within the last five years alone, he said, there had been $350 million in capital investments and 150 high-paying jobs created through the cooperation of the three entities.

“Estimates are that these changes have an annual $40 million positive impact on the Ames economy,” Geoffroy said.

“The Research Park has seen its own expansions, as Boehringer-Ingelheim Vetmedica has added 20 highly paid scientists to its staff, and NewLink Genetics has raised $43 million with the first successful initial public offering in Ames in five years to pursue its cancer vaccine,” Geoffroy added.

“The strength of the economic relationship comes from our faculty. Its expertise has led to success because of the research projects in which our professors participate (for other clients) as well as their own innovations, inventions and new companies.”

The primary reason for the reception was the official groundbreaking ceremony for WebFilings, a company that builds and leases online tools to help publicly traded companies file thousands electronic documents with the Securities and Exchange commission.

“I will enjoy watching the coming success of WebFilings from the sidelines when I leave after the next few weeks,” Geoffroy said.

Competitive environment

In the past 10 years, Geoffroy oversaw efforts to secure funding from private and public sources. Some worked; others didn’t.

“With all of these big grants, no matter where they’re from, there’s intense competition,” he said. “You win some of those competitions, and some of them you don’t win, but what’s important is that you keep competing. And every time we don’t win, then you try to reflect on ‘Well, why didn’t we win, and what can we do better to be more competitive the next time around?’”

One of the biggest successes came in April 2007, when Conoco-Phillips announced it would fund an eight-year, $22.5 million research program at ISU, dedicated to producing renewable fuels.

There were two other major grants, including:

• $20 million from the National Science Foundation, which ISU will share with the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa. The “Experimental Program to Stimulate Cooperative Research,” or Project EPSCoR, will also leverage $4 million of in-state (public and private) funding and will focus on renewable energy, including biomass, wind and solar, and green energy conservation initiatives.

• a $10 million USDA grant to study the feasibility of heating native grasses to produce a type of biomass-based crude oil that can be refined into gasoline and diesel oil and used in conventional motor vehicles.

Geoffroy said the grants came because of persistence.

“You’ve just got to go after them,” he said. “Faculty members know it often takes the writing of several proposals, several different agencies before you land a big one, but you’ve just got to keep to trying, keep putting your best ideas, your best people forward and go for it.”

The new ISU biorenewables building represents an area of research that “has been a focused thrust for the university … and we’ve had a lot of success getting funding from the state, private industry and federal agencies,” Geoffroy said. “It’s a national need to try to find alternate sources for energy, fuels, high-valued chemicals, and biorenewables offer an avenue for those solutions.”

The university’s emphasis on biorenewables is one reason why DuPont Danisco chose to build a new cellulosic ethanol plant near Nevada, Geoffroy said.

“They chose that site in very large part because of the facilities that we have here and the expertise that we built in biorenewables,” he said. “That’s just one example of a huge investment being made in central Iowa because of the focused work that we’ve done at Iowa State.”